Awesome Music: This little gem, which has a completely different feel from the rest of the game's Bond-style soundtrack, but just makes you want to go out and shoot people FOR THE GLORY OF PANAU.
Complete Monster: Pandak "Baby" Panay is the oppressive and brutal dictator of Panau. Having usurped and assassinated his father, Panau's previous, benevolent, president, Panak immediate begins his regime by stripping away the rights of his citizens, and increasing his power in the military. If anyone questions his government, he has them tortured and killed. During the revolution, Panak has innocent civilians arrested, tortured and sometimes killed for minor offenses. After a botched attempt to kill him, Panak retaliates by ordering a nuclear strike against Russia, America, China, and Japan, whilst attempting to kill Rico Rodriguez, promising to make his suffering legendary.
Crazy Is Cool: There might be a way to take over a country without car surfing, an infinite supply of parachutes, and a grappling hook gauntlet, but that's not Rico's way.
Crosses the Line Twice: How the game keeps you from taking it too seriously. A kangaroo court so efficient it can kill thirty people in an hour? Disturbing. President Panay bragging about it as propaganda and urging people to buy his book about it, titled Execution Extravaganza? Hilarious.
Goddamned Bats: There's at least a single enemy that can irritate even the most cool headed players: Elite Mooks armed with large machine guns. If you're not particularly careful, you're gonna die by them by a whole lot.
There's an achievement for driving all unique vehicles on Panau. DLC vehicles do not increase the amount of vehicles you need to drive, but driving one does add towards the total. Not very useful on its own, but when you're missing just one vehicle (especially if it's one of those vehicles that appears in a single mission, then it's gone forever), it's a godsend.
Speaking of vehicles: much like the bodies of soldiers, if they're damaged in some way and then left alone, they will eventually fade away. However, until they've actually faded completely, they still have collision, at least for the grappling hook. You can, as such, tie the fading vehicle to the ground or a person - and it will stop fading, but it won't un-fade. In essence, you'll get a ghost-car that you can partly see through, can't get in to drive around but can stand on top of, and which will instantly disappear as soon as you untie it.
Workers at pipelines have a bizarre tendency to T-pose at the console◊ until you disturb them.
If you open the parachute too close to the ground, Rico's subsequent tumbling is completely immune to Falling Damage. This allows you to get the thrill of ragdolling down an entire mountain without the risk of injury.
If you never ally with any of the Factions, Karl Blaine will call you to describe all three of them every time you die or load your save, and the news will talk about the events of "Casino Bust" after that. This can cause a number of humorous scenarios, such as beginning the mission briefing for "Into the Den" and then being unable to hear Sheldon talking over Karl, or other people calling you on your PDA and interrupting Karl or the news. Beating the game results in the incongruous scenario of Karl calling you when he's dead, while the news cares more about you escaping the casino with Karl than the president dying in a nuclear explosion.
Harsher in Hindsight: Remember how in this game Tom Sheldon was accused of betraying the Agency? Also remember how Rico was ordered to clean up the Agency's mess by taking him down, otherwise he'd be seen as a sympathizer to a traitor? Well as of Just Cause 4, Rico and Tom Sheldon genuinely have gone rogue, and deem the Agency to be their true enemy. In context Rico expresses disappointment that the Agency has mountains of messes that he and Sheldon have had to clean up at one time or another. He's sick and tired of their corruption, and suggests to Sheldon that they take the Agency down; Tom Sheldon agrees to this plan after recovering from his shock.
Ho Yay: It's hard not to suspect Sri Irawan may have some special feelings for Rico.
Inferred Holocaust: Rico's rebellion involves destroying critical aspects of Panauan infrastructure like water towers, electric relays, and gas stations. In the nation's large, modernized cities this might not be too much of an issue, but you also need to do this in impoverished rural villages that likely rely on this infrastructure for survival. It's to the point where Avalanche took this criticism to heart and limited the infrastructural damage in 3 to the military bases; in towns and cities you instead focus on destroying the regime's propaganda tools (e.g. loudspeakers, statues, and billboards).
It's Short, So It Sucks!: Subverted. The Agency (Story) missions is only seven missions long. In turn, actually getting to these missions is dragged out due to certain Chaos requirements needed to unlock Agency missions. Then again, this isn't a game that you play for the story and many of the faction missions are just as great as the Agency missions, if not better.
Junk Rare: The Bering I-86DP, a massive, heavy cargo plane with sluggish handling and a huge wingspan that makes it impossible to land. It's also the rarest vehicle in the game, only spawning at two specific airfields in the whole of Panau and you'll need some tactics plus luck for the plane to spawn while you're able to take it. They stop spawning when their bases reach 100% completion. After that, you'll have to resort to glitches.
Misaimed "Realism": Aircraft have realistic takeoff runs and turning, but don't have yaw control. This tends to result in large amounts of driving off runways because the player tried to correct their angle during the run up the runway and didn't get up to speed, and / or hopelessly hanging planes up on the scenery while trying to make simple taxiing turns.
Most Wonderful Sound: When you complete a base capture mission, the Mooks you've been escorting start chanting "SCORPIO! SCORPIO! SCORPIO!". It serves the dual function of letting you know that the worst is now over and making you feel like the biggest badass on the planet.
Polished Port: The PC release is quite well optimized, running much more smoothly than most Wide-Open Sandbox games released at the generation in spite of its massive scale while continuing to look really good, and the keyboard and mouse controls are responsive and customizable. Other developers could learn a thing or two about porting games to the PC from Avalanche Studios.
Then there's the fan-made multiplayer mod, which has finally been released on Steam after numerous beta tests. Hell, even if you were to ignore the multiplayer mod, the game's surprisingly easy-to-mod anyway. It's as easy as creating a new "dropzone" folder in the game's root directory and placing your modded files (especially those from this site) in there.
Quicksand Box: Panau is so huge that even the developers agree it may be too big for some players to handle. Hence, the strictest collection achievement only requires you get 75% of the map. Pity the person who needs to hundred-percent driving all the vehicles, though!
Sequel Displacement: How many of you knew there was a Just Cause 1 before Just Cause 2?
Surprisingly Improved Sequel: The first Just Cause had some nice ideas, but it was overall a clumsily-made, somewhat awkward game, and was actually that development studio's first effort. They have obviously been brushing up since then, because while Just Cause 1 could have been easily forgotten, Just Cause 2 is awesome.
Collecting black boxes for the Reapers. Unlike the Ular Boys' skulls and the Roaches' drug drops, all of the black boxes are underwater. Most of them aren't too bad, but several of them are out very far at sea. You'll need a boat or aircraft to get there, and then swim all the way down because the Grappler just couldn't do it. Oh, and you might not get back to land all that easily.
"Black Gold" seems simple enough. Take a Reaper jet and blow up an oil rig. The problem is that the jet you're given has paper doll endurance and controls horribly, and there are a surprisingly high amount of enemies present. This is further compounded in the PC version, where if you die during the mission, the damage you cause to the oil rig does not reset, which could very well make the mission Unwinnable. Fortunately, there's a helicopter spawn point close to the mission start that makes it infinitely easier.
"Panau City Bridge Ballet". After skimming part of the city and doing some bridge limbo, there's a waypoint between the two supports of a suspension bridge, right around where the cables attach to them. Problem one: the previous waypoint doesn't set you up for this as it is low to the ground with the bridge cables in the way. You need to break off and come around to reach the checkpoint. Problem two: this bridge is curved, so you need to be turning while flying through the waypoint. Turn too little, smash into cables, BOOM. Turn too much, smash into the other side's cables, BOOM. Then it's some more low city flying before you have to fly between two skyscrapers. Once again, the previous waypoint is no help because it would require a sharp 90 degree turn that isn't possible in a plane. You need to come around another skyscraper, line up and realize the other problem: the gap between the two buildings is too narrow for a plane flying level, so you need to get your wings perpendicular to the ground before you hit the buildings. Did we mention this game doesn't have yaw controls?
Tough Act to Follow: The smooth launch, relatively little issues and bugs, a large world to explore and have fun with, a story that didn't take itself very seriously and gave way for almost a hundred things to do, and the exotic South East Asian setting is something unique for games of this genre, and subsequent games were increasingly less well received due to Avalanche practically doing the opposite of all the points above (while still keeping the "large world to explore and have fun with").
The side mission "Stranded" could be made into an entire game all on its own. A pilot gets mysteriously downed on an isolated island that no one visits, is always stormy, and is rumored to be haunted by demons or the ghosts of dead cannibals. You are sent to pick him up, but get blown out of the sky by something. The island is actually inhabited by ancient Japanese soldiers from World War II who think the war is still going on, and are defending their territory with an EMP superweapon. You have to disable the EMP and escape the island. So much could have been done with this.
, which has a completely different feel from the rest of the game's Bond-style soundtrack, but just makes you want to go out and shoot people FOR THE GLORY OF PANAU.
